Prominent literary critic and author Helen Elliott worked in the Box Hill Library from 1964 -19169 when it was a small rectangular building in the middle of Whitehorse road. There were perhaps 20 staff. All female. The Chief Librarian was a man Bert Lewis.
In her recent Memoir, Eleven Letters to You, Elliott devotes two of the eleven letters to people at the library in those years. Helen Garner called Elliott’s book: “A quietly ecstatic work of memory – intense, witty, beautiful.” Biographer Brenda Niall called it “A rare feat of imagination and memory, Louise Adler called it “deeply evocative, with the humanity of Facey’s A Fortunate Life, written on the little piece of ivory favoured by Jane Austen.”.
Elliott has invented a new form of memoir, full of detailed social history and addressed to people she loved and honoured all those years ago. Box Hill, over half a century ago was a world now as lost and seemingly as long ago as the Eighteenth Century. .She will speak in detail about those days, those times, that other world.